“Taking a vehicle from the War Crimes Group’s . . .” Throughout early 1946, the War Crimes Group’s Captain Somerhough kept a close eye on Hanns’s activities. On the bottom of one of Hanns’s typed dispatches, Somerhough had scrawled a note, dated February 18, 1946: “Capt. Alexander due on Pohl then Flensburg re Höss and Glücks.”
“Hanns’s first stop was at the home of Glücks’s wife . . .” The details of Hanns’s investigation into the whereabouts of Richard Glücks come from Hanns Alexander’s field report, UK National Archives, March 13, 1946.
“ran out of the room and hid under a tree . . .” Many years later Brigitte would say that she still experienced migraine headaches because of the incessant shouting of Hanns and his colleagues that day.
“Hanns realized that they must develop . . .” This version of the story comes from Captain Cross in an unpublished letter he wrote on March 27, 1985, to Colonel Robson of the Intelligence Corps. It is worth noting that Cross does not get all his facts right. For example, he mentions in this letter “Frau Hoess [sic] and three sons,” whereas Hedwig had only two sons. An alternative version is provided by Brigitte, Rudolf’s second daughter, who remembers her mother telling her what happened: Klaus and Hedwig had been arrested and were indeed in separate cells. For days Hedwig was tormented by her son’s agonized screams as he was being tortured by Hanns and the other British soldiers. Still, she didn’t relent, until she was visited by her brother, Fritz, who informed her that Rudolf had managed to secure passage out of Germany and was at that very moment on a boat to safety in South America. It was only then, knowing that Rudolf was safe, that Hedwig revealed her husband’s identity and location to Hanns. However, Hedwig’s version of events does not match the rest of the evidence, and it is quite possible that Hedwig told this story to her children so that they did not believe that she betrayed their father to the British.
Chapter Sixteen
“Over the next hour the men . . .” According to the letter written to Colonel Robson of the Intelligence Corps by Captain Cross on March 27, 1985, some of the men included in FSS 92 unit were Henshaw, Rapkins, Durkin, Kuditsch, Wiener, Roberts, Cresswell, Dobons, Abrahams and Shiffers, though some of these men had adopted alias identities. For example, “Shiffers” was in fact Sansavrino.
“Hanns knew that they all wanted to be ‘in on the kill’ . . .” Over the years, numerous people have claimed to have been involved in the arrest of Rudolf Höss. Indeed, in a tape-recorded interview with his nephew John Alexander, Hanns said, “Lots of people were involved with the work. Some people were reading the letter to the wife, others were watching the wife.” In his field report, sent on March 15, 1945, Hanns mentions the doctor from 5th RHA, Captain Hartford from 318 FSS, as well as the men of Captain Cross’s FSS 92 unit. Rudolf Höss’s official arrest report has Captain Cross’s name on it, though such documents were often signed by an administrator rather than the person who actually carried out the arrest. In Richard Butler’s book Legions of Death, Bernard Clarke, one of the members of FSS 92, says that he was involved with the arrest. (It is from this book that the quote from the doctor comes: “Call them off . . . unless you want to take back a corpse.”) At the Imperial War Museum in London, there is a file which places Charles Steven Mackay close to the interrogation of Höss. I spoke to Ken Jones, in Wrexham, a British soldier based in northern Germany during the war, who said that he slept in the cell with Höss to ensure that he didn’t kill himself in the days after the arrest. The official and unpublished history of the British Army Intelligence Corps gives credit of the arrest—“their most important catch” they called it—to one of their members, Karl “Blitz” Abrahams, a Liverpool-born and German-speaking Jew who was a member of Field Security Section 92. I spoke to Karl’s son, Stephen Abrahams, who said that he possessed letters between his father and mother which confirm that he was involved with the Höss interrogation, but the letters do not mention the arrest and his father never spoke to him about these events, nor did he write about them in his memoirs.
‘In ten minutes I want to have . . .’ Hanns knew that he was responsible for Rudolf Höss being beaten during his arrest. In a recorded interview with Herbert Levy, he said, “[Rudolf Höss] did say that he was extremely well treated by the British, with exception of the arresting officer. I did my bit . . . guilty.” Those ten minutes of abuse, along with allegations of further attacks at British hands, would be enough for scores of Holocaust revisionists to argue over the years that Rudolf Höss’s testimony was tainted. Their argument goes like this: Höss’s testimony was beaten out of him and therefore his evidence at Nuremberg, and later his autobiography, could not be relied upon. This led them, supposedly logically, to argue that because the “story” of the Final Solution relied so heavily on Rudolf Höss’s testimony, the Holocaust never really happened.
“At around midnight the prisoner . . .” In his autobiography and his later testimonies, Rudolf maintained that the only person he had ever killed himself was Walter Kadow, back in the 1920s. This conversation with Hanns in the truck was the only time that Rudolf ever admitted that he personally killed any other people. Later, he had acknowledged supervising the murder of two and a half million people, but never to killing by his own hand.
Chapter Seventeen
“Martin Bormann . . .” After many years of rumors and unconfirmed sightings, the German government confirmed in 1998 via DNA evidence that Martin Bormann had died in May 1945 near Hitler’s bunker in Berlin.
“Cables zipped back and forth . . .” A cable sent from BAOR headquarters on March 22, 1946, said: “HOESS [sic] is to be tried by the British authorities and the Poles have consequently been told that we are not prepared to hand him over.” Then on March 27, another cable said: “Foreign Office in favour of Hoess being handed over and consider it a matter of high political importance.” Finally, on April 27, a letter was sent to the U.S. Army in charge of Höss’s custody in Nuremberg, saying that the British had now agreed to the “delivery” of Höss to the Polish authorities, but if the Polish government didn’t sentence Rudolf Höss to death then the British government will “request his delivery to British Authorities for a further trial.”
“By contrast, Whitney Harris looked dapper . . .” I met Whitney Harris in his office in St. Louis, Missouri. By this time, Harris was in his nineties. He was charming and generous with his time. “In Nuremberg we based all our efforts on written documents,” he told me. “We wanted to prove the accuracy of the Holocaust beyond a shadow of a doubt. This would be the first time in history that war criminals would be brought to justice, and we wanted to get it right.” Harris died of cancer at his home in 2010.
“The first was Gustave Gilbert . . .” The inkblot test had been invented in 1921 by the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach and, while popular with American psychologists, it was new to Gilbert. He presented Rudolf with ten individual 4 x 10-inch cards, each covered with different oddly shaped inkblots. The first five cards were printed in shades of black and white; the second five were brightly colored, with reds, blues, oranges and yellows. He asked Rudolf how he felt about each card and what the pictures resembled. The prisoner said that one card looked like an animal skin, another like two people dancing, and a third was like a “pelvic girdle of an exhumed corpse—during my activity in the concentration camp I often attended post-mortems and exhumations—a post-mortem dissection.” A recent review of the Kommandant’s responses by Rorschach expert Barry Ritzler suggests that Rudolf was a sensitive man who was more expressive than the other Nazis tested in Nuremberg and, as a result, avoided situations that might stimulate an emotional response. Ritzler also says that Rudolf appeared to be experiencing depression when he was tested in Nuremberg and that he lacked empathy. This might explain his bout of what he called “prison psychosis” from his prison time in the 1920s, as well as his daughter Brigitte’s recollection that “he was sad when he came back from work.”
“The defense lawyer, Dr. Kurt Kauffmann, i
ntroduced Rudolf . . .” The Nuremberg Trials were conducted in English, German, French and Russian. Everything said was instantly translated into the four languages by a panel of interpreters who worked in a long line of booths to one side of the main courtroom. To understand what was being said, participants, including Rudolf, wore chunky black plastic headphones that were hooked into an elaborate system of cables, amplifiers and transistors. This was the first time that any judicial proceeding had been simultaneously translated into so many languages. After the trial a similar sound system would be installed at the new United Nations building in New York.
“At lunch in the prisoner’s canteen . . .” Frank’s explanation that he was now willing to admit his role in the Holocaust because of Höss’s testimony the day before was reported in the London Times, April 20, 1946, under the headline: “Frank declares his guilt: Part in massacre of Jews.”
“While Rudolf had been appearing as a witness . . .” Later that year, in October 1946, the Nuremberg judges handed down their sentences: of the twenty-four defendants, twelve were sentenced to hang, Kaltebrunner, Göring and Frank among them. Martin Bormann, who was tried in absentia, was another of those sentenced to death. Seven of the remaining twelve defendants were sentenced to life in prison; the rest were acquitted.
‘My dear good Mutz . . .’ It is not clear what Rudolf meant by Mutz, his pet name for Hedwig. According to the Langenscheidt dictionary Mutz can mean a ‘bear,’ a ‘bobtailed animal,’ or a ‘short tobacco pipe.’ But as with most family nicknames, the origin of its meaning may be more obscure. These previously unpublished letters from Rudolf Höss to his wife and children are held by the Auschwitz Museum.
“Little good it did them . . .” The fate of some of the key Nuremberg defendants was as follows: Ley had killed himself before the trial; Kaltenbrunner and Pohl died on the gallows; Göring escaped his sentence by killing himself in his cell the night before his execution; and Hess—Hitler’s deputy—spent the rest of his life in Spandau prison, Berlin, until he died in 1987.
“On the last page of his memoirs . . .” There are times in his memoirs when Rudolf avoided the truth to protect others, as when he claimed that his wife didn’t know about the gas chambers when she clearly did. And there are times when he is simply wrong about the facts, as when he claimed that the anti-Semitic magazine Der Stürmer was edited by Jews, or perhaps when he claimed to have received the orders from Himmler to implement the Final Solution in the summer of 1941, rather than 1942, which most historians now consider more likely. Equally, at various venues Rudolf provided different numbers for those killed in Auschwitz—to the British in Camp Tomato he had said 2 million, to the Americans in Nuremberg he had said 3 million, in his prison writings he had said that Eichmann’s figure of 2.5 million was too high, while at his Polish trial he had said the figure may have been closer to 1.5 million. However, if his various testimonies are compared, they show remarkable consistencies, given the stressful context within which they were given. Most historians therefore agree, with some small qualifications, that his memoirs are reliable.
“According to a journalist from the Times . . .” The Times article on Rudolf’s trial, published on April 25, 1947, under the byline “from our Warsaw correspondent,” was written by Joel Cang. Between March 1946 and December 1948, Cang (1897–1974) was the paper’s correspondent in Poland. Between 1927 and 1948, he was also the Warsaw correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and News Chronicle. In this same article, Cang wrote that he met Höss in a side room during the proceedings, describing him as “disconcertingly unlike any concept of one who, as witnesses swore, had seized Jewish children and hurled them on to the death-cars and watched the SS men under his command burning other children alive . . . In appearance and manner he was the complete denial of any criminal type theory.” While they were talking, Rudolf showed Cang a copy of a letter he had received from Hedwig on the day that the trial began. When Cang asked how he could bring his children up so close to the camp, Rudolf replied: “I kept them away from all that.”
“Enclosing his wedding ring . . .” According to documents supplied by the Polish Government Institute of Remembrance, Rudolf’s wedding ring, which had proved so decisive in Hanns’s unmasking his real identity in Gottrupel, was returned to his wife in Germany on April 28, 1947, with the words: “I enclose Rudolf Höss’s wedding ring which the Highest National Tribunal has allowed to be sent together with Höss’s last letter to his wife, Hedwig.” Rudolf’s daughter Brigitte confirmed to me that her father’s wedding ring was sent to her mother, along with the two letters to Hedwig and the children. She added that Hedwig wore the ring on her finger until her death and that it was interred with her ashes. Rudolf’s death’s head ring, which Klaus had carried to Hedwig in the last days of the war, is now held by Rainer Höss.
“letter to his children . . .” A copy of this letter is held by the Auschwitz Museum in Poland. The original, though rarely viewed, is kept in a box tucked away at the back of a crammed cupboard in the home of Rudolf’s second daughter, Brigitte, in Virginia.
“Originally scheduled for . . .” This account of Rudolf’s final days was compiled by the researchers at the Auschwitz Museum in Oświęcim.
Epilogue
“The families of the Nazi leaders . . .” The children of the senior Nazis reacted in different ways. Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank—the Nazi governor of the General Government of Poland—wrote that he had been “condemned to a living death because of the slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic that I had for a father,” and explored his feelings at length, in explosively angry tones, at one point confessing to masturbating over his dead father’s photograph during a teenage birthday. But where there was guilt, there was also pride. Gudrun Himmler, the daughter of Heinrich, supported a group that raised funds for Nazi veterans. Perhaps more conflicted was Wolf Rudiger Hess, the son of Hitler’s secretary, Rudolf Hess, who, protesting against the unjust Spandau prison imprisonment of his “innocent” father, refused to serve in the German military.
“It was the last time Hedwig Höss appeared . . .” In 1989, Hedwig traveled to Washington, DC, to visit her daughter. After a week playing with her grandchildren and seeing the sights, she went to bed one day and didn’t wake up. Her ashes are entombed in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, marked only with the words: “Mutti 1908–1989.” In an effort to conceal her final resting place still further, the paperwork in the cemetery has her identity misspelled and backwards—“Hansel Hedwig”—rather than her maiden name, “Hedwig Hensel,” or her married name, “Hedwig Höss.”
“He jumped from job to job . . .” During his time in Toronto, Paul and his wife, Lila, were among the early active members of Congregation Habonim, a synagogue attended by other Holocaust survivors from Germany and other European countries, and one established in the German Liberale tradition. The synagogue is still going today, located on Glen Park Avenue, Toronto.
“A year later, the Luxembourg Government . . .” In a letter dated April 15, 1948, sent by the British Foreign Office to the Luxembourg Embassy in London, an official explained why Hanns—along with Tony Somerhough and Gerald Draper—would not be able to receive a knighthood from Luxembourg: “I am afraid that the rules and principles observed by H.M. Govt. in these matters prevent us from returning a favourable reply . . . The services which the proposed decorations are intended to recognize were rendered after the termination of hostilities. Persons in the service of the Crown are not ordinarily permitted to accept foreign honours, and this rule has only been relaxed so as to allow of the acceptance of Allied awards offered in recognition of services during the war . . . I feel sure, however, that you will appreciate how extremely difficult it would be to give exceptional treatment to these cases without injustice to numerous other British subjects to whom the rules have already been applied.” With hindsight things could have been different. For though Hanns Alexander wore the British uniform at the time of his service (January 1940–April 1946), he wa
s in fact considered stateless by the UK until his naturalization in April 1947, and therefore perhaps the Luxembourg government could have awarded Hanns the knighthood without requiring UK permission.
“Hanns did not receive either award . . .” While Hanns was precluded from receiving the significant awards from Luxembourg and Czechoslovakia, he did receive three more common awards from the British army for his general wartime service, including the France & Germany Star, the Defence Medal and the War Medal 1939–1945. These he proudly wore each year when he joined the annual veterans’ parade down Whitehall in London.
“From the start, the Alexander Torah . . .” Sometime in the 1970s, a few days before the High Holy Days, Hanns discovered that one of the Alexander Torah’s handles had broken. The scroll was almost two hundred years old by this point and, given its constant use as the synagogue’s main Torah, it was not surprising that it needed repairing. The scroll was now Hanns’s responsibility and inheritance. There was not enough time to have the scroll repaired by a trained and experienced Sefer Torah scribe, so instead, he chose to fix it himself. After work one day, Hanns went to the synagogue, removed the Torah from its Ark and laid it down on the podium at the center of the stage. Carefully unwinding the scroll, he then detached the broken wooden handle to which the parchment was connected and, after a brief visit to the synagogue’s kitchen cupboard, replaced it with a broom handle. Once the scroll was wound up and covered by its velvet cloth, Hanns replaced the Alexander Torah in the Ark, ready for its next religious outing.
Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz Page 30